downloading or accessing jar files when using GitHub actions for R package check

[mkoohafkan]

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I have an R package that provides an interface to some Java classes, and the package provides a helper function to do a one-time download of the required .jar files. I also host the package on GitHub and use the R-lib/check-r-package action to run R CMD check on repo push. However, I currently skip the tests when running the check-r-package action because the .jar files are not available. I would like to get the tests fully running via GitHub actions but I don't know the best approach for this. It seems like my options are:

1. Call the helper function in a script before calling R CMD Check. But I would need the package to be installed in order to run the command, which obviously is a problem since the whole point of the GitHub action is to build and check the package.
2. Upload copies of the .jar files to the GitHub repository so that they are accessible by the package tests. But now I'm hosting copies of the jars and I would want users to download them from the original source and not from my repository.
3. Download the .jar files via a separate GitHub action. But this would mean that I have to maintain two versions of the dependency installation.

What is the best practice for solving this type of problem?

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[yashpal2104]

Did you get the solution for this @mkoohafkan ? please share your solution with me. I also want to learn how do I download Jar via Java

[mkoohafkan]

My solution was to modify the workflow to download the jars to an appropriate location prior to running R CMD check. Right now the jar versions are hard coded but I think I could change that in the future parse the default config included in the package (probably by hardcoding th link to that file.

You might be interested in something like

• https://github.com/marketplace/actions/setup-maven-action
• https://github.com/clausnz/github-action-download-maven-artifact
• https://github.com/nvoxland/jar-download-action

[yashpal2104]

Thanks for this will check it out👾.
I think mostly docker is used nowadays so maven artifact can be pulled from there